Pastor's
Page By
Fr. George Welzbacher February
11, 2007
History is full of surprises. When, for example, the
Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtila, was elected to succeed
Pope John Paul the First, the brevity of whose pontificate had itself
come as a shock, many in the West had never heard of the youthful
churchman from Poland. And few of those outside of Poland who had taken
note of his career would have had an inkling of the astonishing
difference his pontificate would make both in restoring morale within
the Church and in bringing down the Soviet empire.
Pope John Paul's successor, Pope Benedict XVI, has
provided his critics with a surprise of his own, disconcerting the
secular pundits who at the time of his election wrote him off as an
out-of-touch crank, as one who, far from reversing Western Europe's
disengagement from religion, would by his negativity reinforce it. In
its issue of February 2, 2007 the mass-circulation German magazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror) described
a startling about-face in German public opinion, particularly among
those of the intelligentsia who had shown themselves conspicuously
unimpressed by Pope John Paul. Indeed the derisive reception given to
John Paul the Great on the occasion of his visit to Berlin in June of
1996 was rivaled only by an earlier massive display of contempt before
and during his visit to Holland. Who knows? Perhaps the turnabout in
German public opinion will have an impact next door.
One of our parishioners who knows his way around the
Internet gave me a copy of an English translation of the Spiegel essay, courtesy of the
Rene Henry blog. I reprint it here, extensively abridged. The
translator was not identified.
*
*
*
* *A Pope for
the Melancholy Modern Age
By Alexander Smoitczyk

Why is a
reactionary Bavarian anti-modernist in white robes so fascinating to
the enlightened intellectuals among us? The riddle that is Joseph "Sepp
" Ratzinger, a. k. a Benedict XVI.

The man has everything
needed to induce weeping and
gnashing of teeth in the most hardened left-wing liberal. He has put an
end to liberation theology. He despises rock and pop music, even if
people pray along with it. He has ruled out ecumenical services and
stubbornly refuses to allow divorcees to take communion. He fratemizes
with the anti-modemist LeFebvre disciples and pro-lifers, but gay
priests are banished from the seminaries. And to top
it off, all this power is expressed in ... an old man's high-pitched
voice: "Cari fratelli e sorelle... "

Pope Benedict XVI is a thorn in the side of every enlightened
intellectual.... "Atheists should welcome the election of Pope Benedict
XVI. For this aged, scholarly, conservative, uncharismatic Bavarian
theologian will surely hasten precisely the de-Christianization of
Europe he aims to reverse, " predicted the British political writer
Timothy Garton Ash immediately after the conclave. He was way off base.

The man from Marktl am Inn may not have packed the churches in Bavaria.
But for some reason, during the 18 months following his investiture,
the Roman Catholic Leader has drawn greater numbers of the curious to
St. Peter's Square than did his predecessor. He is feted in Cologne and
Bavaria like the German national soccer squad. And following his speech
in Regensburg, he put his personal stamp on intellectual discourse urbe et orbe
likefew popes before him.

What is it about Benedict? Or could it just be that the times have
changed? German feature journalism, in particular, has undergone a
seismic shift. Columnists are yearning blithely for the good old Latin
liturgy and meeting with approval. The editor-in-chief of a new
intellectual magazine has composed a "creed": "Why the return of
religion is a good thing." Highbrow newspapers like Die Zeit and Frankfurter Aligemeine carefully
analyze every utterance from the Apostolic Palace. All the German
pundits worth their snuff are hanging on the pontiff's every word.

Intellectual interest in papal pronouncements has long been a tradition
in Italy, and Joseph Ratzinger maintained an ongoing dialogue with the
agnostics there. In Germany, this intellectual involvement marks a new
departure. Something has happened: The country of... Marx and Nietzsche
has lost faith in godlessness.

Germans in many parts of the country... may still believe that a rosary
has something to do with flowers. But they are no longer indifferent to
faith. Unlike just a few years ago, they take a real interest in
tidings from Rome, even in a thoroughly politicized city like Berlin.
The secular intelligentsia's curiosity is piqued; it is flirting with
the una sancta,
the "One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. "

Benedict XVI is the ideal partner for this tango ... He says:
Enlightenment must be enlightened. He is an intellectual who does not
replace reason with mysticism, but instead deploys it in the service of
God.

For him the truth lies not in Mystical self-immersion, but right here
on Earth, at his desk. For Ratzinger, action driven by reason is the
trademark of true religion. Benedict is the the right pope for an age
in which people have straved from the path of faith but still yearn to
arrive at a destination - even if that destination is ultimately faith.
He is the right popefor a melancholy, modern age.

Benedict's surprising charisma is due in part to the differentiated
attitude this German has brought to the papacy in particular and to
Roman Catholicism in general. Broadly held assumptions notwithstanding,
Joseph Ratzinger did not want this job ....
what he wanted was to go home to Bavaria and write the three
fundamental treatises that only he could write, along with a study of
Jesus Christ

The address he delivered as cardinal deacon to open the conclave... was
intended as a [farewell]. "How many winds of doctrine have we known in
recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of
thinking?" he lamented in the style of Cato the elder. "The small boat
of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these
waves - thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to
liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical
individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from
agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth."...

"Having a clear faith " was being perceived as fundamentalism, he
proclaimed, "as hopelessly passe under a dictatorship of relativism
which does not recognize anything as certain and which has, as its
highest goal, one's own ego and one's own desires...... The
popemakers in Italy elected the German professor - despite his advanced
age. They believed he alone was capable of lending the truth-seeking
Church an audible voice in a Europe cacophonized by transcendental
illiteracy ...

The professor pope pens page after page: letters, sermons, speeches,
epistles, books. Several hundred theological works already make him the
most published pontiff in church history. He seizes every opportunity
to put systematic theology into practice and into print. Benedict XVI
is even capable of working a reference to fundamental theology into a
letter of accreditation to the Andorran ambassador.

But the man can be stubborn, too, stubborn as only a German professor
can be. [Vet]a speech for [political correctness]? Never. Even if it
criticizes the prophet Mohammed. Ratzinger's appointment as head of the
church has not really interrupted his lifelong mission He toils away at
his basic conflict, pitting "truth" against the "relativism" of
the modern age: The focus must hb on the human being as God's creature,
not as a substitutefor God.

Worldly promises of salvation have always led people to their doom, be
they the promises of the Nazis at home in Traunstein and elsewhere - or
those of the Marxists and their disciples with their liberation
theology .... "within this history of mankind which is ours, "
Ratinzger wrote, "there will never be the absolute, ideal condition."
Which more or less means: Salvation is not of this world, let's not
fool ourselves, but instead let's try to live truthfully. "Many
of those who are responsible for proclaiming [the truth] fear that
people might recoil from excessively clear words. However, general
experience proves that the opposite occurs." Benedict XVI exhorted
bihops whose road had led to Rome for an ad limina visit.

It was at Auschwitz, in May, 2006, that he said, "We believe in a God
of reason, not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but in a God
who is one with love and goodness." That is an extended definition of
reason, in which technological, scientific rationality harks back to
the human as godly. Faith, he wrote in his first encyclical, "helps
reason to better.fulfill itself to become every more fully itself
......

Ratzinger has mulled all his life over these unequal siblings, faith
and reason, which explains the leniency and interest with which German
cultural critics have received this pope. He is one of us....

He is a thinker, with a theology that has not changed significantly
since his 1959 inaugural lecture in Bonn.... In the beginning is the
Word, Logos, not blind faith. And certainly not mystical experience.
Man encounters the self at the level of thought. That is why believers
can communicate with non-believers. That is why the Frankfurt
philosopher Juergen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger harmonized so
perfectly when they discussed the "Dialectics of Secularization" at the
Catholic Academy in Munich. If the Word is a gift from God, then the
theorist who champions communicative action can but nod agreement...

Benedict knows that his days on Peter's throne are numbered, and one of
his closest associates is certain that this pope will not stay on until
his dying breath: "Being a thinker, he will know when he is no longer
capable of adequately performing the duties of his office." Time is
running out. Ratzinger has been planning three reforms in the spirit of
veritas, none of which is political in the true sense of the word.
These are ecclesiastical reforms which radicalize the organization,
penetrating to its liturgical structural and ecumenical roots.

"Beauty of the Liturgy"
The core project of Benedict's pontificate is his counter-reform of the
liturgy. Even at his first World Synod of Bishops, debate centered on
the... chronology, form and sequence of the Eucharist. For Ratzinger,
the church crisis is a crisis of the liturgy as well.

Ratzinger is convinced that the churches have already [up-dated]
themselves too much - at the expense of the sacred. As a child, he
himself had found faith in the "beauty of the liturgy," back when
people still prayed on their knees and the children mindlessly rattled
off responses in a foreign tongue they could not understand.

If the Latin Mass (which was never formally prohibited) is resurrected,
this should not be done solely to win back the traditionalists. The
dramatization of the sacred- Gregorian chants, billowing incense,
ritual formulas murmured in Latin, the whole marvelous mystery play
with a soupcon of Dan Brown - is a unique selling point" on the
faith market, and should not be thoughtlessly cast aside.

The second reform concerns ostpolitik [rapprochement with the East] in
its ecumenical guise. A dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox Christians
isfar more important to Pope Benedict than debating with the Anglicans
or the Protestants ..

Lastly, the perestroika process inside the Vatican must continue. The
number of congregations and working groups has been reduced and a
non-member of the Curia - Tarcisio Cardinal Bertome of Genoa has been
appointed secretary of state. The College of cardinals has been further
globalized by the appointment of three new Asian members. As his own
successor as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
Ratzinger chose the Archbishop of San Francisco, William Cardinal
Levada, who is anything but a dogmatic
rottweiler. Ratzinger does not need
additional bite. Notwithstanding the smiles....Ratzinger has not backed
away one inch from his rigid stance on socio-political issues. Marriage
is forever; abortion is a crime; women are not entitled to follow the
Apostles [as priests and bishops]. Modern society must abide by God's
word. Period.

Ratzinger has not changed his tune; he has simply modulated his tone.
As pope, he no longer has to be "Mr. No." The Catholic Church, he often
notes, is not a steel body of rules, regulations and bans. Or at least,
not just that. It is also a
community of the loving ....

Deus caritas est, Benedict's first encyclical in January 2006, was a
meditation on love.

The encyclical was a eulogy, extolling love, eroticism in marriage, and
social work. He simply switched the level of abstraction and made
himself more unassailable. This pope doesn't talk about condoms; he
talks about exploiting people (even if it's only for a one- night
stand). This pope gets to the bottom of things....

In October 2006, a star-studded colloquium at the University of
Muenster discussed "The Return of the Religious" - and identified an
"ego weariness" in Germany, a post- modernist upward valuation of the
concept of truth: "Man cannot survive on doubt, irony and
deconstruction alone, "What is left for us to believe in, if everything
is open to discussion? And who is going to take us seriously?" This is
the fundamental question addressed in Germany by numerous bestsellers
and talk-show debates on "values," "the new Kulturkampf," "the
parenting challenge"and so on.

In the post-modern age, everything was somehow OK; values were
relative, and we believed that was a good thing. By September
2001[i.e., 9/11] at the latest, this belief was called into question.

There was no more room for irony.

How can truth exist in a pluralist society? Joseph Ratzinger has
pondered this question all his life. And it has never been more
relative than today.... And in that context, the man in the Papal
Palace is right for his role. Benedict XVI ... can communicate
eye-to-eye with the secular world. He already sees eye-to-eye with the
spiritual one.